Game Development Blog about Dias, a Capstone game project by Jon Kenkel and Zach Lorenzen, two Buena Vista University computer science students.
Dias is a fully 3D, team-based, competitive multiplayer, arena platformer being developed in the Unity game engine.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Week 7 Day 4 - Odds, Ends and Abilities

Today we nailed down a complete list of abilities. Obviously this will change as we try new abilities out, but we want to get as many of these implemented as possibly by Alpha 2, or at least 2 columns of abilities.

Light Role

Support (Builder) Role

Heavy Role

Attack-based Ability

Push (coned area)

Box Drop (from sky)

Push/Slam (area around player)

Defensive-based Ability

Blink (Straight up)

Create Wall

Steal Weight

Movement-based Ability

Roll (possibly ignore other abilities while rolling)

Grapple (like a grappling hook)

Ram (run forward and push other players out of the way)

Ultimate (and probably imbalanced) Ability

Rocket (large force on player it hits)

Destroy Platform

Ground Slam

Passive Ability

1/2 Dash Cooldown

Aura that lowers cooldowns for nearby players

Weight Gain

From the previous list of TODOs, we have completed the following:

Pinging system that disconnects clients when they lose connection with the server

The last player that 'dies' at the end of a game is properly destroyed when the game is over

The mouse is now 'locked' to the window while controlling the character

Solves the issue on Linux with the mouse escaping the edge of the window

Solves the issue on Mac with opening the top OS menu when aiming upwards

Characters now are instantly 'teleported' to the location they respawn to, rather than being pushed to that location

Minus the items that are directly linked to abilities, here are our remaining goals for Alpha 2:

Hit detection

Character-based scoring, rather than just Team-based

Moving the camera to aim from the sides of the characters, rather than from the top.

As a final note, work was started on the Box Drop ability under the Support Role, however we are considering doing the Light and Heavy abilities as the 2 columns. The reasoning for this is that those 2 roles are more easily understood to inexperienced testers. It would also give a better idea for what to expect from the choosing of abilities for all other users.